supers with honey. In mid-August, Joe and
his crew begin to extract it.
With the nauseating stink of Bee-Go in
the air, they truck the supers to a ware
house on Bee Hill. In the extracting room
Joe lifts out the frames and lowers each into
an "uncapper," where rotating blades
shave away the wax that covers each cell.
Joe and Chris Slater put the uncapped
frames in a carousel that sits on the bottom
of a large stainless steel drum. They fill the
carousel to capacity with 72 frames, and
Joe flips a switch. As the frames whirl at
300 revolutions a minute, centrifugal force
throws the honey out of the combs.
Finally the honey is poured into barrels
for shipment to a honey-marketing cooper
ative in Sioux City, Iowa. But not before I
America's Beekeepers: Hives for Hire
taste a finger full. It's delicious-light and
not too sweet, with a slight bite from the
basswood--and a soothing salve for all my
beestings.
By the end of September Joe has finished
harvesting 330,000 pounds of honey, which
now sells for 52 cents a pound. But after
paying his expenses-including equipment,
fuel, insurance, and labor-there's not
much money left over. After 30 years of
migratory beekeeping, Joe and Florine
have $11,000 in savings.
"Clearly we're not in the bee business to
make money," says Joe. "We're in it to
make a living and have a good family life."
That way of life -the whole face of U. S.
beekeeping, in fact-may be changing.
One of the first cuts in the federal budget